Abstract: Science education in South Africa is problematic, although this has been reported as a global phenomenon. This has placed tremendous demands on science teachers as they need to develop in learners the educational objectives as outlined in the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) for natural sciences, life sciences and physical sciences. Literature pertaining to research in this field shows that the affective outcomes seem to be the least addressed and could be considered a “missing link”. This study explores how in-service science teachers experienced a short learning programme and how it enhanced their pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) to teach for the affective domain. It also distils design principles for designing and implementing such programmes in future. This short programme was based on a humanistic socio-scientific issues instructional strategy and offered by the Department of Science and Technology Education of the University of Johannesburg. In order to investigate this issue, an extensive literature review was done to explore issues related to teaching for the affective domain as well as possible short intervention programmes to improve teachers’ PCK for teaching for the affective domain. The research design and methodology employed involved design-based research, consisting of two cycles of short learning programmes, where findings from the first programme which took place at the University of Johannesburg and continued at the schools where lessons were observed, informed the second short learning programme which took place in a public high school in Johannesburg South. Data was collected through a set of pre- and post-intervention questionnaires, in-depth one-on-one and focus group interviews, evaluation forms, visual materials (photographs) and observation protocols (e.g. The Reformed Teacher Observation Protocol) for the lessons observed at the various schools. This study employed a predominantly qualitative method of data analysis involving Saldana’s code-to-theory coding model and some mathematical procedures involving Krathwohl’s taxonomy of the affective domain, which allowed the teachers to be profiled at its different levels based on how much they had or had not learned...